Georgia Tech Wrapup

The game clock just ran out but this Tiger football team is just getting started. I was very impressed by what I saw tonight even though we had a lot of lame-brained mistakes. We started out the game by blowing two offensive opportunities, allowing a big triple option touchdown, allowing a punt return for a touchdown off a blown pooch kick, and allowing a fake punt pass for a touchdown. After that the Tigers locked down Paul Johnson and the triple option, and held Tech to only 3 more points until the last minute of the contest.

Kyle Parker continued to show that he has what it takes to be a great quarterback. The Tiger defense continued to aggressively go after the ball and came up with some big interceptions. Most encouragingly, we made some big time adjustments and went on a 24 unanswered point streak. That is something we never did under the previous coaching staff. Overall we did better in this game than I thought we would and we even spotted Georgia Tech 14 points in the first quarter. Such is to be expected with a young team and a young coach.

The sad thing about this game is that the outcome was radically changed by an officiating mistake. Yes, Clemson made plenty of mistakes and those are the main reason we lost: you take away the 14 points from special teams errors and we win the game by 11. However, that doesn't change the fact that the referee called a holding penalty on an offensive lineman that used correct blocking technique which resulted in the reversal of a long pass play that put the Tigers in field goal range. Our lineman had both of his hands inside, on the numbers, just like you're supposed to. He drove the defensive lineman to the inside towards his teammates like you're supposed to do. The defender fell down as he was being blocked. There was no illegal blocking there and the holding penalty was incorrect.

There is no guarantee that if you take away that bogus penalty with 3 minutes left in the game that Clemson would have won the game. We could have fumbled on the next play, who knows. That still doesn't change the fact that the last 3 minutes of the game were played out differently than they should have been because of a terrible officiating mistake. In such a hard fought game, with one team coming back from such a deficit, it is unacceptable that such poor officiating alters the results of the players on the field.

The great thing is that our coaches and our players showed that they have character: if they get down early, they can make adjustments, find the other guy's weaknesses, and fight back. This is something we haven't seen around Clemson in a long time. Also, our defense showed that it can completely shut down a powerful offense. We will face tougher passing tests this year, but we probably won't face a team that's better at running the ball than we faced tonight, and after a few missteps in the first quarter we completely locked them down for a good 45 minutes. Another positive is that even though we had another boneheaded tipped pass on offense (caused an interception) we had some guys step up and make tough catches and make big passing plays. This is only game 2 and we are showing that we have some seriously dangerous quick strike weapons and we have a quarterback that can get them the damn ball. We have a lot of positives going for us coming out of this close loss.

Some quick notes:

• Rendrick Taylor, I'm sorry about what I said in my last post, that was some amazing blocking tonight. I just hope you can realize how much of a beast you are and hit people like that when you're holding the ball.
• Dabo, please don't use the field goal pooch kick any more. It's cool if you have a smart kicker, but obviously we do not.
• Also, please don't run a trap on 3rd and 1 in a critical situation, especially against a good defensive line. The pulling guard always gets blown up into the backfield and disrupts the play, and against a good defense it just won't work, so stop it.
• I counted 4 junk plays tonight. That's 4 too many in my book, but still much better than Bowden (reverse, tunnel screen, and two shotgun options I think)

In conclusion, the Tigers played a lot better tonight than I thought we would. We put together some great drives and we had some great quick strikes. We still had some costly drops, but our offense as a whole really showed some great signs. Unfortunately, just as I predicted, we needed a special teams big play to get the win tonight and we just didn't get one. In fact we got two in reverse, both going for touchdowns for the bad guys. Our defense played much better against the triple option than I thought they would and our team played their hearts out and battled back in the face of seemingly unsurmountable odds. This is going to be a great year for Tiger football and if Dabo learns from his mistakes then we might even get a rematch with these guys at year's end.